Alibaba Launches Qwen App Beta to Accelerate Consumer AI Expansion in 2025

On 17 November 2025, Alibaba released the public beta of its Qwen App thus defining a milestone to the consumer artificial intelligence market. 

The ‘Qwen’ project reflects that Alibaba’s AI strategic focus has started to shift from the B2B enterprise market towards the B2C consumer market.

It uses the Qwen3 model which features six dense models and two Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models, offering developers flexibility to build next-generation applications across mobile devices, smart glasses, autonomous vehicles, robotics and beyond.

Qwen3 is the most advanced model used by Alibaba, and is available free of charge on iOS, Android, web, and PC platforms in China, and an international version is expected in the near future. 

Given the appearance of a high-end personal assistant, Qwen is more than a simple chat program as it is able to handle complicated jobs including the process of creating detailed research reports and providing multi-slide PowerPoint presentations on-demand at the touch of a button.  

Background and Features 

The Qwen project, which was announced earlier in the year, represents a strategic pivot of Alibaba moving its AI focus, a mover of B2B dealings mainly, towards a vast presence in the consumer B2C market. 

The Qwen App uses AI-assisted coding, voice touch, and camera functionalities, and aims at being a universal AI lifestyle assistant. 

Alibaba has been committed to invest in AI infrastructure, with at least 380 billion yuan over the next three years contributing to the creation of foundational models and AI-native applications and applications that can eventually be of direct benefit to Qwen.  

Alibaba is set to release its latest quarterly earnings on 2025/11/25. The forecast for FY26Q2 indicates that Alibaba’s China e-commerce business revenue will reach RMB 126.9 billion, a year-over-year (YoY) increase of 11.6%. 

The EBITA margin is projected to be 6.8%, showing a significant decline both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter due to heavy investments in instant retail during Q3. 

The forecast for FY26Q2 predicts intelligent cloud business revenue at RMB 38.2 billion, with a YoY growth of 29%, and an EBITA margin of 9.5%, reflecting a slight increase both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter.

Impact and Competitive Edge  

According to a source, Qwen demonstrates superior performance as compared to many of the world’s open-source AI models, such as Llama and Deepseek, and is gaining a significant amount of traction even in Silicon Valley. 

Industry leaders including the CEO of Airbnb Brian Chesky have praised the speed and performance of Qwen when compared to OpenAI models and Nvidia has made an announcement by Jensen Huang praising the fast growth of its market shares. 

As one of the direct competitors to ChatGPT, the Qwen App aims to take over the consumer AI market by reintegrating themselves into everyday life through office work, health, shopping, and navigation.  

Risks and Roadblocks

The Qwen application by Alibaba faces a number of challenges; such as the presence of a high level of competition with already positioned artificial intelligence firms like ChatGPT by OpenAI and Google Bard/Gemini that have the potential of limiting its market penetration outside of China. 

The focus of regulators on AI ethics and data privacy is also a major challenge that can slow down the internationalization of the product.

The high initial capital investments required to meet the infrastructure development and continuous innovation can strain the financial status of Alibaba especially during the volatile economic climates in the world. 

Lastly, the acceptance of the user depends on the smooth integration and the development of trust, which is also challenging. 

Future Outlook  

The aggressive investment strategy and technological development of Alibaba foresee the transformation of Qwen into the mandatory entrance to the AI-based consumer services. 

With the increased user adoption rate, Alibaba plans to cash in on the broad-based ecosystem and merge the capacity of Qwen with the e-commerce and other daily services. 

Such high-level consumer-oriented drive, combined with the high task-management capacity of the app, places Alibaba in a potentially beneficial position to redefine the global market of AI assistants.  

The introduction of Qwen Apps at Alibaba represents a significant step that might transform the way consumers interact with AI so that advanced AI should be as easy to access and usable by millions.